The Official Appreciation Page for the Best of the Wikipedia Rejects

It's been a couple of years since I checked on Clifford Pickover's The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, a blog about deleted (or marked for deletion) Wikipedia articles. I forgot how much fun it is!

Maja Einstein is the younger sister of great scientist Albert Einstein. Maja was the only friend of Albert during his childhood. When little Albert saw his sister for the first time he thought she was a kind of toy and asked: “Yes, but where does it have its small wheels?”

Wikipedia’s deletion policies are reasonably sound. They do end up deleting some articles that are good, but in doing so, help ensure that the articles can be made reliable and accurate.

Essentially, subjects need to be notable enough that they have multiple independent sources about them. Without those sources, writing a solid article would be impossible. Someone might be able to write a very useful article with a single source, but there would always be worries that the source might be inaccurate or biased; with multiple sources, this risk is significantly lessened. By having such restrictions, Wikipedia loses some articles that might have been useful, but also maintains a higher level of integrity than it would otherwise be able to have. By insisting on verifiability for articles, and deleting those that don’t satisfy the conditions, we can better prevent original research by editors and articles that end up being bogus or incorrect because of a lack of sources.

And, of course, there are also articles that are simply absurd, and also articles about absurd theories/practices/quackery that are written by their proponents. In the latter case, it’s often easier to delete the articles due to a lack of verifiability than to try to deal with the proponents and write a neutral article.

Note that these are only articles that were nominated for deletion. Some passed, some didn’t. (e.g. I’m slightly surprised that Bacon, egg and cheese sandwich made it through – can you imagine if every conceivable combination of ingredients on bread had their own article?)

Also, what Wa said.

And by the way, the Doctor Steel article got kept recently, once someone was actually willing to take the time to dig up reliable sources on him, and to write an article that wasn’t blatant advertising.

i don’t think i’ve ever used Wikipedia for any sort of research
or even for entertainment purposes.

in fact, the internet is generally poor for research, especially scientific. i’ve seen error-filled science entries appear on multiple websites without any attempt to correct the errors – one can’t beat good old books

In the mornings at the delis I frequent, the BEC seems to outnumber all other sandwich orders put together by 2 to 1 or so. So it’s not just any old combination of ingredients, but I suspect it is a regional thing, as there aren’t really delis outside NY metro area, and this phenomenon amazed a friend visiting from the South.

Damn straight. If I want to look up the 30,000 podcast, there’s nowhere to verify the information. Hell, how do you even know it has 30,000 subscribers in the first place. Just having someone reputable be citedfor the information makes it that much better. Go Wikipedia!

That said, I hear that admins will give you copies of deleted articles if you ask nicely… A friend of mine got something that way.